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Video: Ruth Davidson admits (to empty) #CPC17: it IS all about Corbyn

Scottish Tory leader Ruth Davidson addressed the gathered – ‘massed’ would really not be appropriate – ranks of Tory activists today at the Conservative party conference in Manchester. She made a bizarre admission.

Just after the General Election, a Tory think-tank published a desperate cry for help, saying that the right must get rid of Corbyn to have a chance of political survival:

Lest anyone think that was a one-off and things have moved on, that refrain has been repeated over and over among Tory mouthpieces:

Davidson’s speech to the Tory clingers-on today continued and extended that theme, as she admitted to her audience that the media believe that Corbyn will walk into Number 10 – and tried desperately to persuade her fellow Tories that Corbyn can be beaten:

Make no mistake – the woman that many Tories tip to be a future and possibly the next party leader – knows her party is terrified of Corbyn. She knows that it’s a herculean task if it’s possible at all. And she knows their morale needs shoring up.

The Tories are in disarray and running scared – it’s why they bribed the DUP in a frantic attempt to cling to power, because they don’t believe they can win another election in the foreseeable future.

This is huge. Davidson – of course attempts to camouflage it by cloaking her comments in mockery, but fails: almost four months after the General Election, Labour’s surge under Corbyn shows no sign of abating. The party in government – in name, at least – feels the need to brace the shattered morale of its activists against the political dominance of the leader of the opposition.

The many – the largest political party in Western Europe – juxtaposed with the few.

If your enemies define themselves by you, you’re winning. The Tories are defining themselves in comparison to Corbyn – whether that’s by copying his policies in a hopeless attempt to close the gap between themselves and him, or by trying to convince themselves he can, somehow, be beaten.

There’s such a thing as trying too hard. Protesting too much. This is what it looks like.

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Can you ratchet down the language? I’m a subscriber and support what you do but every time I read that the Tories are ‘terrified’ of Corbyn or Labour you (or anyone) lose plausibility. They are not ‘terrified’. They may worry that they are going to lose, they may fear him but they are not ‘terrified’. You devalue the language: how do you describe people who truly are terrified because they have F16s coming in to bomb their villages or are facing a mad gunman in Las Vegas or Neo Nazis in Charlottesville?

Fair point, Nigel. But there’s no attempt to make equivalence between Tory political terror and the fear experienced by those in danger of their lives. ‘Afraid’ or similar simply wouldn’t convey the reality of the Tories’ panicked responses to Labour under Corbyn